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Pop artist Mel Ramos dies at 83

Born in Sacramento, he worked and lived most of his life in Oakland

Charles DesmaraisOctober 15, 2018Updated: October 17, 2018, 3:13 pm

Mel Ramos in his studio in 2012. Photo: Crocker Art Museum, .

The Sacramento-born Pop art painter Mel Ramos, known for appropriated cartoon imagery and randy depictions of nude women incongruously set among commercial icons, has died. His death, on Sunday, Oct. 14, at Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center, was confirmed by his daughter and studio manager, Rochelle Leininger. The cause was heart failure. He was 83.

Born Melvin John Ramos on July 24, 1935, Ramos studied art and art history at Sacramento State College. After teaching in area high schools, he joined the faculty at Cal State Hayward, now known as Cal State East Bay, in 1966. He retired in 1997 but continued there as an emeritus professor, and also taught intermittently at what is now California College of the Arts.

Other artists who came to attention in the early 1960s for their use of comic book imagery, like Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Ramos’ teacher Wayne Thiebaud, parlayed that first success into international stardom. Ramos did not quite achieve those rarefied heights, but his work entered the permanent collections of more than 35 major museums and was presented in exhibitions internationally.

A retrospective exhibition, “Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Superheroes, Nudes, and Other Pop Delights,” was presented at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento in 2012.

The San Francisco art gallery Modernism has represented Ramos for 38 years, said Martin Muller, the gallery’s founder and president. He called the painter “a remarkable human being, artist and teacher.”

“Riding various political and social trends in the art world over the past decades, he remained focused on the act of painting, with passion, awareness and discipline,” Muller said. “Aside of Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha, he was the last of the major first-generation American Pop artists.”

Ramos lived and maintained a studio for many years in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, spending part of each year at his home in Spain. In addition to his daughter, who lives in Danville, he is survived by his wife, the former Leta Helmers, and his son Skot, of Burbank.